Quest: Mountain Gorillas: Discovery Channel

Another Snare

The latest snare case: a female mountain gorilla in Nyakagezi Group,
Uganda, has wire wrapped around her elbow.

Last week started with bad news: we heard about another snared gorilla, the second case in less than a month in Uganda's Nyakagezi Group.

The trackers found a young gorilla with a wire snare around her arm and immediately called Dr. Benard Ssebide, our field vet in Uganda. They reported the gorilla seemed normal otherwise, with no sign of injury or swelling in the hand. That indicated there hadn't yet been any permanent damage. We quickly prepared for an intervention the following day.

Last month's case: a male mountain gorilla, Rukundo in Nyakagezi Group,
Uganda, has wire wrapped around his right hand.

Gorillas can sometimes pull out of a snare. If not, they can usually break free by biting or pulling on the wire or rope until it snaps. Unfortunately, this causes the loop to cinch even tighter around the snared finger, arm or leg. Because of the gorilla's thick hair, the only sign of the snare may be the frayed loose end of rope or wire.

In this recent case, the first thing the trackers noticed was something shiny sticking out from the gorilla's right elbow. The problem was much more obvious in Rukundo, last month's case: he had a loop of bicycle brake cable wire encircling his hand.

The young gorillas in Nyakagezi Group usually move with one of the three silverbacks.

The morning after the report came in, I packed up our intervention kit, drove to the Uganda border, did all the paperwork so I could cross, found Benard in Kisoro, a small town near Mgahinga Park, and continued with him to the park boundary where we met the trackers.

Our group reached the gorillas a little after noon, just as clouds began to fill the sky. We found our patient quickly and confirmed the problem. She walked past us and sat down near Mafia, the group's young silverback. As she ambled by, we caught a glimpse of silver wire around her right elbow.

Gorillas can't untwist the bicycle brake cable wire used for snares.

The gorilla eyed us a bit nervously for several minutes. Then she calmed down and began to eat bamboo. Although the wire wasn’t all that tight, there were several frayed ends poking out. It looked like (and turned out to be) bicycle brake cable.

There are reports that gorillas have sometimes been able to remove their own snares. So when a snare is loose, we may have the option of giving the animal a day or two under close observation. But no one has ever reported a gorilla untwisting a wire snare stuck near its elbow. Rukundo couldn't untwist the wire around his hand, either.

Dr. Benard Ssebide, MGVP field vet, Uganda

As I had during the snare-removal procedure for Magayane, a female gorilla in Rwanda who also had a brake cable wire snare around her hand, I assumed the role of photographer/videographer while Benard administered the anesthetic dart.

Our patient stayed close to one of two young silverbacks, which meant Benard had to wait patiently for almost an hour and a half before he got an opportunity to fire the dart gun. His dart and the anesthesia worked fine We began the procedure just as rain began to fall.

Dr. Benard Ssebide and Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) tracker Ishmael
position the anesthetized gorilla for snare removal.

We can only estimate the age of this female. She transferred from one of Rwanda's wild gorilla groups to this one several years ago. She's about the same size — around 40 kilograms (or 88 pounds) — as the case from last month, Rukundo, a young male. They’re probably also about the same age, between 6 and 7 years old.

I learned that she hasn't been named yet. Nyakagezi Group moves around a lot, and the composition of the group kept changing for many years. Now that it's more stable, I hope the Ugandans will give her a name.

Benard and Ishmael remove the snare.

The snare proved difficult to untwist or cut, despite the efforts of two men — Benard and tracker Ishmael — and two Leatherman tools. In the future, we need to carry even bigger wire cutters for these thick brake cables.

Finally, they managed to loosen the cable and we slipped it off over the gorilla's hand. It started to rain harder as we moved on to the next part of the exam. Benard asked the trackers to hold a rain poncho over us, which worked well enough initially, except for the hole you put your head through. We should have pulled the tarp out of the kit earlier when we had time.

After loosening the snare, we easily slipped it off the gorilla's arm.

Sheets of rain began to fall just as Benard started collecting blood samples, a routine step whenever we anesthetize a gorilla. The improvised tarp above us sagged under the weight of the water. When one of the trackers holding the poncho moved a few inches, a bucket of cold water poured down my back. I managed to smile. Better me then Benard, I thought.

Then, as if someone had turned on a faucet, a stream of water poured through the hole in the poncho onto the gorilla's belly. I swiped it away, looked up and got another small shower.

About 40 minutes after the gorilla went down under the effects of the anesthetic, she began to move. We hadn't finished everything we usually do during an intervention, including taking body-size measurements and other routine samples. Even so, we'd accomplished our main goal, removing the snare.

Gorillas tend to hunker down in the rain, and we wanted this one to find her family sooner rather than later. So rather than supplementing her anesthetic, we let her wake up. She recovered surprisingly quickly. She rolled to one side, got up and walked away from us a few minutes later, heading right toward her group.

Last year's bicycle brake cable wire snare was Magayane,
a female in Rwanda's Kwitonda Group.

Once again, I can't help worrying about the rule of threes. We've had two nearly identical cases in Uganda. I'm crossing my fingers that there won't be a third.

Maybe Magayane's case counts as the first. She had a snare of bicycle brake cable wire wound tightly around her middle finger. It damaged the blood supply and caused significant swelling. We didn't amputate the finger, hoping it would be OK. It wasn't. She kept the wound clean until the damaged tissue fell off (See Magayane Performs Her Own Surgery). Magayane's case was the first metal snare in years. Maybe these two cases in Uganda will be the last.

Farmland near Mgahinga National Park, Uganda

The rain let up slowly during our trek back. The minute we left the forest to walk the last kilometer through farmland, the sun came out. Oh well — at least our patient would soon be dry. The next day the trackers reported that she was fully recovered and with her group. Meanwhile, we've asked that the anti-poaching patrols in this region of Mgahinga be stepped up.

[Rwanda, April 20, 2008. Pictures: Dr. Lucy Spelman/MGVP]

New Simple Tests for Humans Could Help Gorillas

Kwitonda silverback eats a stalk of bamboo.

A few months ago, I received an e-mail from Samantha Newport (then communications director at WildlifeDirect) with an offer of medical supplies from a woman in Switzerland, Jackie Sonderegger, who works for a company that makes medical diagnostic test kits.

Jackie was planning a stay in Mombasa, Kenya, and Samantha knew we'd save a bundle on shipping if we could coordinate getting the supplies to Kenya and from there to Rwanda. Jackie invited me to check out her company's Web site (http://www.doctorsdirect.md/Disease-Testing.html) and pick out what might be useful for the gorillas.

MGVP lab manager Jean Paul Lukusa

One of my goals has been to find tests we can run "in house" to screen the gorillas for diseases. For most samples, including those Jacques and Magda recently collected from Mapendo, we can do some tests in our regional lab — at least when the power is on! But we often wait weeks to months for other types of tests while permits are processed.

Various instant result lab tests have been developed for humans in recent years and I've been trying to learn more about them, especially those that screen for viruses and bacteria that cause respiratory infections. Our lab manager, Jean Paul, is more than willing to run new tests.

Jackie Sonderegger in the mail room at MD Doctors Direct in Switzerland,
preparing a box of supplies for MGVP.

To my surprise, the choices from Jackie's company included easy to use and instant result test kits for influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and streptococcus, all respiratory diseases that we worry about.

These tests use a Q-tip-like swab to take samples from the back of the throat or pharynx. The swab is placed in a special snap test chamber; the color change indicates a positive or negative similar to that of a pregnancy test (her company donated those, too!). I made a wish list and sent it back to Jackie, who responded immediately that she'd do her best to pull all the items together.

Grauer's gorilla Mapendo is bonded to her caretakers,
but even they can't place a swab up her nose.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to use these new tests on wide awake gorillas, even the orphans. Mapendo nearly bit a hole in my stethoscope the other day and I wasn't trying to put it anywhere near her mouth. But we can run the tests on samples taken from anesthetized gorillas. We can also use them for our employee health program. It's a long shot, but we might also be able to use these new test kits on other types of samples, like feces — the most easily collected gorilla sample.

Chimpanzee wadge of ficus fruit (fig) in Nyungwe Forest, Rwanda

The timing of Jackie's donation couldn't have been better for another reason. Recently, Mike and I accepted a summer student from Tufts veterinary school, Tierra Wilson, to work on a small research project on a technique for recovering saliva from uneaten bits of gorilla food. Tierra submitted a grant for her study and got it. She arrives in June.

If her study works, we could have a whole new type of sample to test. Though saliva is not a respiratory secretion, it does mix with fluids that come from the nasal passages and, if the patient is coughing, from the lungs.

The saliva recovery study is not a new idea and it may not work in gorillas. It's been successful in chimpanzees, but that species naturally leaves behind a perfect sample, a "wadge" (a word coined by Dr. Jane Goodall) of uneaten food. Chimps do this most commonly with fruits.

During my recent visit to Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, we found fig wadges everywhere. By contrast, gorillas don't wadge their food at all and they have access to fewer fruits — and no figs. Until Tierra conducts her pilot study, we're not sure if gorillas leave enough saliva behind on a stalk of bamboo, for example, to recover as a sample.

Orphan Grauer's gorillas forage at the Interim Quarantine Facility.

When Tierra arrives, we'll ask the caretakers at Kinigi to collect uneaten bits of forest food from the orphaned gorillas for the first round of testing. She'll centrifuge it and run tests for the presence of saliva.

In preparation, Tierra has arranged through her mentors at Tufts to collaborate with the nearby New England Zoo that houses Western lowland gorillas. She'll test uneaten food samples collected from these animals and evaluate alternate methods of saliva sample collection, such as ropes or other objects for the gorillas to chew on that might retain bits of saliva. We may find these techniques don't work and/or that there's no way to apply them to free-living gorillas, but we won't know until we try.

An adult female mountain gorilla in Shinda Group
chews on a leaf she later dropped.

Though I'm excited about the possibilities of Tierra's study and Jackie's test kits, we have a number of hurdles to clear when it comes to verifying test results. Because gorillas and people are so closely related, we have good reason to believe the results are accurate. But to verify them would mean giving a rare creature a disease just to prove a test works, something we'd never do to a mountain gorilla. There's another challenge with the saliva recovery study in particular: Gorillas sick with respiratory disease often don't eat very well.

Letter of donation from Jackie's company sent in the hope
that officials would waive the customs fee; they didn't.

As it turned out, our first challenge was getting Jackie's test kits to Rwanda without paying exorbitant shipping. Because of the security problems in Kenya, Jackie never made it to Africa.

Instead, she offered to ship us the samples. Since FedEx turned out to be very expensive, Jackie suggested Danzas, a division of DHL. We said OK, not realizing that the shipment would arrive as freight and thus incur a customs fee. Even with a donation letter from her company, the Rwandan authorities would not waive the fee. Understandable, rules are rules. Jackie graciously offered to make a donation to MGVP equal to the amount we had to pay to get the box.

The tests arrived in time to run them on the little Grauer's gorilla orphan, Mapendo. Magda and Jacques had no trouble with the gorilla under anesthesia and all results were (thankfully) negative.

When Jackie offered to make a donation, little did she or her company know that the supplies would help get a small research study going and also give us new ideas about screening park staff and gorilla caretakers for respiratory diseases. As we learn more, we'll report back. Lots to do.

THANK YOU, Jackie and all at MD Doctors Direct. And thanks, too, to Samantha, for pointing Jackie in our direction.

[Rwanda, April 8, 2008. Pictures: Dr. Lucy Spelman/MGVP]

Mapendo Update

Mapendo falls asleep under anesthesia.

MGVP director Mike Cranfield and I were finishing up a meeting when Magda returned from Goma, where she'd spent the day working with Jacques.

"So, how's Mapendo?" I asked. Magda smiled broadly and replied, "A bit fat!"

She and Jacques had just given the orphan gorilla a physical exam under anesthesia. Even better, Mapendo's ringworm is resolving and she shows no signs of rickets, the nutritional disease that contributed to the death of her companion, Vumilia.

Dr. Magdalena Braum and Dr. Jacques Iyanya examine Mapendo.

Magda and Jacques had collected samples for a variety of routine tests, including fecal parasite check, blood cell count, serum chemistry analysis and infectious disease screening. They tested Mapendo for recent exposure to tuberculosis by injecting a tiny amount of a reagent, tuberculin, in her upper eyelid — a standard TB screening tests for primates.

They also vaccinated her for measles, rabies, tetanus and polio. We vaccinate the gorilla orphans in our care because they spend so much time with humans; it's easy to do and we can check on how well the vaccines work by measuring blood antibody levels in the future.

Mapendo eats clover.

The TB test is read at 72 hours, so we get this result quickly. If the gorilla has recently been exposed to the organisms that cause tuberculosis — either the human or bovine form — or has an active TB infection, its eyelid will swell. This test can be confusing, however. False positive reactions have been known to occur in gorillas exposed to related bacteria that live in the soil, requiring a battery of additional tests.

Fortunately, Mapendo's test was negative. We'll test her again in a few months and then every year she lives in captivity. With TB on the rise in human populations, I worry a lot about this disease. Not only is diagnosis difficult, but treatment requires daily oral medicine with a cocktail of drugs, a protocol that would be impossible to administer to the mountain gorillas of Virunga and Bwindi or to the Kahuzi-Biega Grauer's gorillas.

Mapendo with a caretaker in February.

Our lab manager, Jean Paul, ran a number of routine tests on the samples from Mapendo. He found a number of parasites in her fecal sample. Most healthy free-living gorillas carry some parasitic protozoa, worm eggs and larvae. But because they move around a lot, these parasites rarely build up in their environment.

This is not true for captive-living gorillas: because Mapendo lives in an enclosed space, her parasites could cause a problem someday. She'd already been treated with deworming medicine, so it's clear that she'll need to be on a regular regimen of parasite testing and treatment.

Mapendo soon after her arrival in January.

Jean Paul also found that Mapendo has high cholesterol — 195 mg/dl. Not too high, but above reported normal levels for captive western lowland gorillas and higher than what we've recorded for mountain and Grauer's gorillas.

We think the problem is her diet, specifically her three daily feedings of infant formula milk. Just as in humans, high-fat diets have been associated with elevated cholesterol levels and heart disease in captive-living western lowland gorillas. Mapendo needed the extra calories when she first arrived, but no longer. The caretakers will reduce the volume of milk and switch to a lower calorie formula.

Mapendo has an excellent appetite.

As noted earlier, another test to be run on Mapendo's blood samples is infectious disease screening. Here we look for evidence of exposure to a number of viruses as well as those we vaccinate against (after we give the vaccine, these tests will always be positive). Possibilities include herpes, Ebola, influenza and parainfluenza.

Unfortunately, sending samples to outside laboratories in the U.S. or Europe takes time. We need an export CITES permit first. In Mapendo's case, this document must be issued by officials in DR Congo. We've requested it, but know we'll have to wait.

Three Grauer's gorillas housed at the interim quarantine
facility, in Kinigi, Rwanda.

Though we can push through the red tape to expedite the permit process if the gorilla is sick or we're worried about a possible disease outbreak, Mapendo's situation doesn't fall into this category. We do need her results before she can live with other Grauer's gorillas, but that's still a distant prospect.

Last week, a number of the partners involved in orphan gorilla care visited yet another location in Congo that could be developed into a gorilla sanctuary. But such a facility is months, if not years away from becoming reality. And we still need an interim quarantine facility near Goma, like the one we have in Kinigi, Rwanda.

Mapendo's teeth

Mapendo's physical exam yielded one more important piece of data: her age. Though we'd photographed her teeth before (when her mouth was opportunistically open) we couldn't be certain of her dental formula without a hands-on exam.

Magda and Jacques confirmed that Mapendo has both of her upper and lower premolars but no molars, which places her age between 2.5 and 3.5 years. Given her size (she now weighs 35 pounds/16 kilograms) we think Mapendo is probably about 3. At this age in the wild, she'd still be nursing a bit, but would be mostly foraging on green plants and a few fruits. No wonder she's gotten a bit plump on all that milk.

Mapendo drinks water in March.

I visited Mapendo in Goma the week after her exam just to check on how things were going. The little gorilla avoided me.

Most small gorilla orphans can be distracted with a tiny bit of food or the offer of a bottle when it comes time for an injection. This strategy had worked well for Magda the week before when she needed to give Mapendo her anesthetic. A quick poke with a needle is easier than a dart . . . but the gorillas remember who stuck them. No doubt I reminded Mapendo of Magda: we're both white women with brown hair and when we visit the orphans we wear similar gear — masks, gloves and gray coveralls.

Jacques suggested we humans sit on the ground, which made a big difference. Mapendo strutted around a bit and climbed briefly on her tripod. Then she sat down in the shade next to one of her caretakers who plucked bits of clover from the grass for her to eat.

When the other caretaker crossed the enclosure to the night house to get her a bottle of water, Mapendo ran like lightning to beat him to the door and nearly succeeded. She drank the water as if it were an enormous treat.

I left feeling pleased to see Mapendo thriving, but sad that her future is so uncertain.

[Rwanda, March 31, 2008. Pictures: Dr. Lucy Spelman/MGVP]